Summer 2002: Fried Pie

M:  Thank you so much for the beautiful cairn necklace and words!  I am delighted by you and your gift.  Much love!  

This post is dedicated one of the most remarkable humans on the planet, my dad.  And it's inspired by the following quotation that's been on my mind of late:  "Would that I had the chance in my sons' lifetime and my own to one day explain to them all the forces that moved me," The Tennis Partner, by Abraham Verghese. 

I spent the summer of 2002 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, conducting research in the developmental biology laboratory of Dr. Robert Duronio.  I had been moderately terrified to move so far away, even for just a summer, but in the end I was SO glad that I did.  UNC-CH is one of the most beautiful university campuses I've ever been to in this country, and I adored my time there.  It boasts of being the oldest University in the U.S., and I relished in the history.  Most of my time was spent in the newer, science-y part of campus, but I made a dear friend, Zib, and she and I would take long meandering walks through the old parts of campus in the steamy southern evenings.  The Spanish moss dripped off of the stout old trees as our Birkenstock-clad feet crunched on the gravel footpaths.  We found a place where raspberries grew wild and frequently paused to munch on them.  We'd often, too, find our way to the main part of campustown and pop into a shop for some Froyo (frozen yogurt).  Everything we could want or need was within walking distance--history, food, music, shopping.  Everything was East Coast and noticeably MORE than everything in my Midwest.  Clothes were trendier, food was tastier, entertainment was plentiful, and I loved it.  I learned how to not eat cereal for breakfast, that I look good when I wear pink, and that the secret to buying new clothes that you'll actually like is frequent shopping where you browse rather than infrequent shopping where you must buy pants and get stuck with awful pants (yea--I may have learned this lesson that summer, but I clearly still break this last one.  I hate shopping).     

At the conclusion of the summer, the research program hosted a symposium at which all of us scholars gave a 15-minute presentation of our research projects.  It was a lovely little event, and my dad bought a one-way plane ticket out to Chapel Hill to attend.  After the symposium he and I walked back to the dormitory where I had spent the summer, hauled all of my belongings down the elevator, stuffed them into my Saturn L-series sedan, and hit the road for what ended up being the road trip of a lifetime.

I'm not sure who's idea it was to take the backroads, but to lend some adventure to our road trip we decided against Interstate travel for the first part of the drive.  We wanted to explore the country!  And explore we did.  That first day, I was driving along somewhere in western North Carolina, and dad and I were chatting up a a storm.  Suddenly, I was confronted with the busiest, most highly numbered orange detour sign I've ever seen.  It had numbers for DOZENS of highways on it, each one with an arrow pointed in a different direction.  This is not typically something that would happen in the Midwest because our highways largely run north-south and east-west in grid-like fashion.  But down in the southeast, roads go every which way, and you can have intersections with more than four turning options!  It's madness!  So I had sped past this epic detour sign, and I thought I saw that to stay on our highway we needed to go left, but dad thought that to stay on our highway we needed to go right.  Well, of course I listened to my daddy!  I dutifully turned right when he pointed to "our detour".

Suffice it to say that turning right was NOT the right detour for our highway.  We ended up completely off course, but everything worked out.  Taking the wrong turn landed us on the Scenic Blue Ridge Parkway, which was absolutely breathtaking.  The only stressful thing about finding yourself on one of the most beautiful drives in America is that there weren't many options to turn OFF of it once you found yourself ON it.  We were rather stuck on the Blue Ridge Parkway for the majority of the day, headed toward nothing in particular.

Our plan was to camp that evening (we somehow had modest tenting supplies--I must have brought them with me that summer? I don't remember at all), so at some point we needed to find a place for camping despite not really knowing where we were.  We found a GORGEOUS campground in the mountains of western Virginia, with a creek running through it and a man playing a clarinet.  He was our camping neighbor, and his lovely melody filled the air among the fragrant pines.  After we set up camp we needed to find some food, because we did not have a cooler or cooking resources on this particular road trip.  So, we hit the unknown road again and got lucky when we found a tiny town nearby.  It was the kind of mountain town that seems to exist along just one road, because the mountains are on either side of the road and there are no other places for roads.  I always wonder where they put the schools in these skinny, linear towns. 

I do not remember what the restaurant was called, but I do recall the band:  Fried Pie.  The lead singer looked to smell of Patchouli, and her sandal-clad toes stuck out from her broomstick skirt.  Her beads clicked as she rocked to the bluegrass beat.  The banjo filled the tiny fluorescent-lit church-basement-like room with its vibrations and twang.  The fiddle sang its heart out while dad and I gorged on fried okra, fried chicken (well, dad ate the chicken), cornbread, and mashed potatoes from the 5-foot buffet line.  I was stunned by our good fortune!!!!  What were the chances of stumbling upon this little town, this tasty meal, and this remarkable music????  All because of a missed detour sign and a wrong turn.  I adored this evening with my dad and Fried Pie.  But our good fortune was not to continue...

The next day we struck camp, figured out where we were, and made a beeline for the nearest interstate to make up some time.  We were still too far away from home to consider finishing the drive on this day, so we found a place to camp in the middle of Indiana.  It was either Brown County State Park or Yellowwood State Forest in the middle of the state, and it was an awfully hot and muggy summer day.  We set up our meager camp in the shade at the base of a forested hill.  It should have been cooler there, but it wasn't. 

We got back in the car and headed into Bloomington, which is likely a fun college town during the fall and spring semesters but was very quiet and dull on this hot August day.  Several establishments weren't even open, but hiding beneath a parking garage we found an air condititioned pub, and that was good enough for us.  We shared a pitcher of ice cold beer and ordered some dinner, nursing our pints so that we could prolong our time in the air conditioning.  We eventually bid a fond farewell to the modern comforts of Bloomington and set off for what would be the worst night of camping in my entire life. 

It was one of those awful summer days when the sun going down doesn't actually help cool things off.  No cool nighttime breezes stirred in the trees.  The hot, heavy air persisted in the campground, moistened my clothing, and shrank my lungs.  Needless to say we did not bother to build a campfire that night, we just crawled into the tent and tried to sleep.  I remember this being uncomfortable due to the heat, but also due to the fact that I was sharing a tent with my DAD, and so there was a limit to the amount of clothing that I could remove.  I don't think I've ever been so sweaty, and I don't sweat very easily.  I still gasp for air when I think about the oppressive heat and humidity that night.  I'm not sure that either of us got any sleep.  We probably struck camp and hit the road before sunup, I don't even remember.  It was so, so awful. 

I always knew that my dad was cheap, but in hindsight I think that that night of camping in Indiana was a defining moment in cheapness.  If ever there was a time to spring for an $80 hotel room, that would have been a great time.  Good thing we had the memory of Fried Pie to carry us home.